@Trentrunner: Also too, it was great to see PBO dinging Trump without EVER saying his name. And knowing that Trump can’t manage to NOT bring up and say Obama’s name DIRECTLY…even when what’s he’s supposed to be talking about has NOTHING to do with Obama

I’m sure he’ll be choking on his twitter rage once he’s told what Obama said and about Obama’s crowd comparison

@Elizabelle: it’s a pity they can’t play a day surreptitiously starting with Carter,followed by HW,WJC,Dubbya and Obama all taking different level digs at Douchebag Dolt45. Preferably on Dolt’s birthday or something similar .

I want to know what kind of a person you have to be in order to disagree with anything Barack Obama said in his speech tonight.

I truly cannot imagine any decent person disagreeing. I guess I’ll see by the reactions tomorrow.

I wish they had this speech available on the C-SPAN tv channel. I’d like to be able to record it on Tivo and go back and watch it. Barack is so real and brilliant and passionate. And then he’s followed by this piece of shit. We need to wake up now and take some action. I just don’t know how we do it.

Maddow is reporting and suggesting that the addition of Chad to the travel ban may have indirectly led to the deaths of American troops in Niger. Chad withdrew its troops from Niger shortly before the troops were ambushed and killed.

… Confederates need guns. The South is a place, but the Confederacy is a worldview. To this day, that worldview is strongest in the South, but it can be found all over the country (as are other products of Southern culture, like NASCAR and country music). A state as far north as Maine has a Tea Party governor.

Gun ownership is sometimes viewed as a part of Southern culture, but more than that, it plays a irreplaceable role in the Confederate worldview. Tea Partiers will tell you that the Second Amendment is our protection against “tyranny”. But in practice tyranny simply means a change in the established social order, even if that change happens — maybe especially if it happens — through the democratic processes defined in the Constitution. If the established social order cannot be defended by votes and laws, then it will be defended by intimidation and violence. How are We the People going to shoot abortion doctors and civil rights activists if we don’t have guns?

and, from the endnotes:

[1] The other clear evidence stands in front of nearly every courthouse in the South: statues of Confederate heroes. You have to be blind not to recognize them as victory monuments. In the Jim Crow era, these stone sentries guarded the centers of civic power against Negroes foolish enough to try to register to vote or claim their other constitutional rights.

James C. Cobb elaborates:

“African Americans understood full well what monuments to the antebellum white regime were all about. When Charleston officials erected a statue of proslavery champion John C. Calhoun, “blacks took that statue personally,” Mamie Garvin Fields recalled. After all, “here was Calhoun looking you in the face and telling you, ‘Nigger, you may not be a slave but I’m back to see you stay in your places.’ ” In response, Fields explained, “we used to carry something with us, if we knew we would be passing that way, in order to deface that statue — scratch up the coat, break up the watch chain, try to knock off the nose. … [C]hildren and adults beat up John C. Calhoun so badly that the whites had to come back and put him way up high, so we couldn’t get to him.”

@amygdala:
They would be at the earth’s core by now if it weren’t for the incompetence. drumpf can’t do anything right. Even digging himself a hole to fall into. Given a normal person, digging that much they would have reached the core but drumpf’s problem is he has to keep digging new holes. He gets others to dig the old ones deeper. Maybe he thinks he’s building a new golf course.

US officials say an office supply issue was a major reason the African country of Chad was hit with travel restrictions by the United States.

Donald Trump’s administration added Chad in an order last month that a judge put on hold this week. Chad’s inclusion was perplexing because the country cooperates closely with the US on counter-terrorism.

It turns out a seemingly pedestrian issue was to blame: Chad ran out of passport paper.

All countries had been given 50 days to take several steps that included providing a recent passport sample. Chad couldn’t comply, and its offer to provide a pre-existing sample wasn’t sufficient.

The homeland security department says there were other reasons Chad was added, too. The department says the US is working with Chad to resolve them.

2/ While everyone is so busy talking about the president’s handling of his call to the widow of the soldier killed in Niger….
3.you ‘re all missing the important part of that story…the part about what happened that night in Niger.

4. The story that is emerging is so much worse than anything that happened in Benghazi

5. but the same GOP Congress that investigated Benghazi with a fury seems to have little or no interest in this story.

6. Here’s what we know so far… .These soldiers went to a meeting in an area near the border with Mali a well known hot spot for ISIS

7 Our soldiers were not backed up by US Military air support- backed up by the French, who were not authorized to intervene or even fire

8 Our soldiers did not have armored vehicles. They traveled in pickup trucks. . Our soldiers were given faulty intel… that said

9 “it was unlikely that they would meet any hostile forces.” Of course, they walked into an ISIS ambush-chaotic and they took three lives

10 It took the French 30 minutes to arrive. When they did they were not authorized to help.

11. So, a dozen of our Green Berets fought a battle with more than 50 Isis fighters, without help, for 30 minutes.

12 Finally, a rescue helicopter arrived, but it was not a US military helicopter.

13 No, we apparently outsourced that job to “private contractors.”

14 So, these contractors landed and loaded the remaining troops, the injured and the dead. . Here’s where this gets really bad…

15 Because they were not military, they never did a head count. That is how Sgt. La David Johnson was left behind.

16 That’s right…they left him behind.

17According to the Pentagon, his locator beacon was activated on battlefield, which indicates that he was alive when they left him there

18 They recovered his body 48 hours later but are refusing to say where.

19 According to his widow, she could not have an open casket. This means that he was mutilated after being left behind on the battlefield.

20 This is what led to the nonsense we’re obsessing over. This is the real story.

21 As usual, you’re allowing it to be about Trump’s distraction, but this is Benghazi on steroids.

22 The Trump Pentagon gave these men bad intel, no support, outsourced rescue people and then,,,

23 tried for more than a week to pretend it never happened. In that time, Trump spoke on many occasions and never mentioned it.

24 He tweeted attacks on many but never mentioned this Only after pressure from the media did he acknowledge these men and their service..

Russian energy major Rosneft has agreed to take control of the main oil pipeline in Iraq’s Kurdistan, further boosting its role as the main international investor in the semi-autonomous region.

The move is an apparent part of a broader strategy by President Vladimir Putin to ratchet up Moscow’s political and economic influence in the Middle East.…
[snip]
Rosneft will be investing in expanding Erbil’s independent pipeline, which Baghdad has targeted, hoping to boost its capacity by a third to 950,000 barrels per day. That is the equivalent of about 1 percent of total global supply. Source

I had Law & Order SVU on in background; getting ready to go out to do some stuff; Corner Stone mentioned on a thread that Kelly was giving a press conference.

I tuned in to CNN, which I so rarely watch, and i’ve probably not watched 1 minute of Kelly previously. I was surprised and alarmed by what I saw from Kelly. Mind you, I had missed his remarks about soldiers being returned “on ice” and mortuary services. Probably came in at the half way point.

But Kelly said a lot of stuff that appalled me. I felt he was using status in the military to divide us; and when he talked about “the one percent” — I am tired of all these sub-groups. Knock it the fuck off.

We are Americans. The handsome and too soon dead La David Johnson is an American, who died serving us.

He is not “the one percent” and a tool to be used for outrage. He just wanted to do his job, come home, and welcome his new baby — they’re expecting a girl — and see his family again.

It’s something none of us have mentioned, but he was such a handsome and appealing young man. All that promise. Gone.

Bohler, the friend who said he was also Johnson’s supervisor at Fort Bragg, said Johnson rose through the ranks rapidly — from a private to a sergeant in less than three years.

“He caught on quickly. You tell him once, and it’s complete, any task,” Bohler said Wednesday. “He was just that one soldier that always wanted to better himself every day. Every day, he wanted to do better than he did yesterday.”

…. Johnson loved to talk about his family, particularly about the woman who raised him, Bohler said. His biological mother, Samara, died when he was a child, according to the slain soldier’s obituary. Cowanda Jones-Johnson and her husband, Richard Johnson, were entrusted with his care after his mother died.

Jones-Johnson is an aunt who raised Johnson as her own son.

“He’s very thankful for having somebody like his Mom, Cowanda, in his life,” Bohler said. “She wasn’t really his mom, but you couldn’t tell.”

Johnson attended Dade County Public Schools and graduated from Miami Carol City Senior High School in 2010, according to his obituary.

In August 2014, he married his best friend, Myeshia Manual.

John Kelly used his press conference to attack the veracity of the congresswoman and friend of the family who was riding with Sgt. Johnson’s survivors. Kelly demeaned himself. He cried “politicization” — aiming it at Cong. Wilson — but it is his own ridiculous shambling POTUS who opened that can of worms.

@schrodingers_cat:
Kelly’s grief is genuine. So is his disregard for the grief and insult that the people who were in Mrs. Johnson’s car experienced. As a white fancy pants general, he is the arbiter of how his inferiors must behave. His self-regard is as immense as Trump’s.

@JPL: The DOD will do a full scrub. How much of that will be made public, however, is a good question. I know that when similar high profile type of things have happened in the CENTCOM AOR that they post the after action reviews and the reports of the outside investigations on their outward facing portal. I don’t know what will happen given the current administration.

But this all comes back to what I wrote about last week: we have a policy regarding our military and its use that cannot be supported with the resources at our disposal. The problem was not that we had Green Berets doing Foreign Internal Defense in Niger. Ultimately it isn’t that someone at either 3rd SF Group or Special Operations Command Africa or AFRICOM or JSOC got the intel wrong – though that is certainly a problem. Rather it is we didn’t have the resources in theater in proximity to our personnel to be able to provide combat support and casualty evac when necessary.

Michael Cohen‏ @ speechboy71
4) By Kelly’s telling Trump was trying to console Sgt. Johnson’s widow – but it seems that somehow that was lost translation 5) Apparently Myeshia Johnson broke down crying when Trump called. Others in the car felt POTUS had disrespected Sgt. Johnson 6) One could certainly give Trump the benefit of the doubt here. That his attempt at consoling Myeshia Johnson went awry 7) But here’s the ugly part: at no point today did Kelly or the WH apologize to Myeshia Johnson or the family of Sgt. Johnson 8) Putting everything else aside, POTUS made a Gold Star widow cry. Even if unintentionally that should bother John Kelly 9) And yet, once again, John Kelly made no public statement about Myeshia Johnson’s reaction to Trump’s words. 10) Instead he savagely attacked Cong. Frederica Wilson for publicizing what happened when Trump called Myeshia Johnson 11) A White House & a Chief of Staff w/ even a sliver of human decency would feel terrible about Myeshia Johnson’s reaction to Trump’s words 12) They would make it a priority to apologize to Myeshia Johnson and to soothe her pain 13) Instead Kelly used his appearance today to defend Trump, attack Cong. Wilson and say not a word about Myeshia Johnson 15) But John Kelly didn’t do that. He defended Trump & said nothing about the unimaginable grief of Myeshia Johnson. That is ugly 16) And if anyone should understand the pain of a Gold Star wife it’s John Kelly. 17) So we learned a lot about what John Kelly today and none of it is good

@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Tom Nichols‏Verified account @ RadioFreeTom
I agree with Cohen about almost nothing on most days, but imo this is a pretty clear-eyed look at what happened today.Tom Nichols added,

You’d think that Trump’s spokesbot could have said something like, “We are so sorry that this has become an issue and once again extend our sincerest condolences to Sgt. Johnson’s widow, family, and friends” AT A FUCKING MINIMUM.

But, no, they had to go to war against a grieving family because nobody was thinking about Trump’s pain.

@mike in dc: @raven: @Jacel: Okay I’ve gotten through the Maddow segment. What she’s positing – that the violent extremists planned and carried out the ambush or, at least, took their planning operational when they did because Chad had withdrawn its forces because of inclusion on the travel ban – is plausible. I’m not sure, however, that we have enough information now to make that conclusion. I’m also not sure we ever will. It is almost a counterfactual type of argument.

@🐾BillinGlendaleCA: Which is strange because since midway through Operation Iraqi Freedom there have been standing separation of medical care in theater for military personnel and civil servants who get their care from military sources and contractors who have to arrange their own medical care. For the big companies like KBR this wasn’t a big deal in Iraq. They sent their own medical sheds and personnel. For my small team with five civilian contractors, two who were retirees, it made getting even routine care for say a cold or stomach bug a pain. They basically ignored the rules and treated us at the FOB medical shed.

@Omnes Omnibus: Maybe if you have an elderly shut-in uncle who watches several hours of Fox News every night and forwards you emails with lots of upper case words and exclamation points, then you can appreciate Fat Bastard’s Twitter style.

@Adam L Silverman: It wasn’t a knock on you. I’ve been out of the active army for over 25 years. I am still appalled that people were sent someplace that we could not get them out of if shit went bad. One can order troops into that if it is necessary, but it must be necessary and you have to tell them about the situation. This was not necessary.

@Omnes Omnibus: I’ve seen a lot of whacked planning over the past decade. I’ve seen strange decisions. I’ve never seen an ongoing FID mission with almost a battalion’s worth of personnel and no Apache or Kiowas for close air support or Blackhawks for CASEVAC. We’re talking maybe a dozen rotary wing total across those platforms for support. I just don’t see how you don’t allocate that for this mission. Hell two Apaches and three or four Blackhawks would have been all you needed to first push back the hostiles and then get everyone out.